Cashbox : 06/25/1960

McLean‘s emergence as a major new alto voice is marked by heaving recording activity, of which this session is the latest. His driving, tearing, slashing manner is an excellent light on Bean And The Boys, I Never Knew and Chasin’ The Bird, and is evidently spurred by the excellent support he gets from Curtis Fuller, Paul Chambers, Louis Hayes, Webster Young and Gil Coggins. Another important date for Jackie.

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Down Beat : 10/13/1960
Barbara Gardner : 3.5 stars

When a persistent suitor with the goodies under his arm knocks continuously on the door, sooner or later, you’re bound to let him in. McLean has been leaning on the bell with a blossoming horn for almost a decade now. This album indicates that the time and the horn are almost ripe.

This is a pleasantly entertaining project. An energetic bubbling McLean is on exhibit, alternately in a quartet and a sextet, adding Young and Fuller. It would be difficult to say which group is superior, because each has its strong tune and its weak track. As for support, the rhythm sections are about even, although Chambers makes a big, healthy contribution to the sextet.

Apparently no aim was made at continuity of themes or material variation. All the tunes are up-tempo, in which McLean is permitted to show off his broadening melodic growth as well as his increasingly facile technique. Unfortunately, the tunes don’t flow into each other, and there is always the feeling of the beginning of something. His quiet opening and closing solos on Rhapsody are the only hints of his ability to handle material in the medium or slow tempos.

The result of all this up-tempo blowing is a deadly sameness that gives the impression that this is his only facet. The self-quotes stand out like neon lights.

Chasin’ is the most intriguing number on the date for me. The interesting interplay of horns and rhythm section is exciting, and Chambers earns his fee right in this one tune.

McLean still has not overcome the problem of any reed man who is momentarily mishandling his instrument – he squeaks. This is most disconcerting, especially on Ghost and I Never Knew.

No peaks, no caverns, no flying through space, no burrowing in the earth. Just a very pleasant, mundane stroll through the changes, generally well executed.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

“I’ve been on the scene since 1951,” Jackie Mclean was saying recently, “and although I know I’m not as famous as some other guys, I do think it’s ironic that the first article ever written on me was in a British, not an American magazine, and it didn’t happen until 1959.” Jackie was referring to Michael James’ Jackie McLean – An Introduction, which appeared in the December, 1959, Jazz Monthly.

Makin’ The Changes, the title of this album, refers, of course, to a jazzman’s capacity to improvise on the right chord progressions of a tune, and also to select those combinations of notes that are not only harmonically correct but are most imaginative and evocative. Jackie, however, is not only thoroughly skilled in change-making, but as Michael James pointed out in his article, “As the years have passed, his playing has taken on a wide melodic sense that underlines his constant devotion to his art. There has been an encouraging and gradual improvement in the quality of his choice of phrase… a finer melodic perception has been gained with no harm done to the emphatic verve that has always been the hallmark of his style.”

Jackie was born in New York May 17, 1952. His father, John Mclean, had been a guitarist with Tiny Bradshaw. His mother gave him a saxophone when he was 13, and he became deeply involved in jazz from that point on. Growing up in the Washington Heights section (around 158th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue), McLean’s neighborhood friends included Sonny Rollins and Arthur Taylor. McLean started to attend the Benjamin Franklin High School, but Rollins had been graduated the year Jackie came. Feeling without sufficiently emphatic comrades, Jackie left after a year and switched to the Theodore Roosevelt High School in the Bronx. A remarkable player whom he came to know there was Andy Kirk, Jr., who is no longer active in music.

“Bird,” Mclean recalls, “used to come to Andy’s house, and just listen.” In McLean’s own development, Bud Powell was a key initial influence. “Bud made me play by ear, and taught me a lot about chords. Some times I’d come by his house on a Friday afternoon after school, and we’d play, off and on, until Sunday. He also revealed much about himself to me, but I was only about 17 then, and I didn’t understand all I heard.” It was McLean who started the late Richie Powell playing piano. “You’re Bud Powell’s brother,” he used to explode. “How can you not play?”

Miles Davis gave Jackie his first major league job in 1950 although he had previously played in Sonny Rollins’ neighborhood combo. Jackie has since been with George Wallington, Charlie Mingus, Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers, and for the past eight months, as this is written, he has had an acting player role in Jack Gelber‘s The Connection, a brilliant and unsentimental probing of the addicts world, produced at The Living Theatre in New York. Jackie plays with biting passion on stage, although he is getting much bugged at having to play roughly the same music night after night for so long. As an actor, he’s displayed unexpected skill-playing his role with sardonic, dead pan effectiveness.

This album is made up of two different sessions. The larger group includes Curtis Fuller, trombone; Webster Young, trumpet; Gil Coggins, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Louis Hayes, drums. The quartet tracks have Mal Waldron, bassist Arthur Phipps, and Arthur Taylor. Coleman Hawkins‘ Bean and the Boys was first recorded by Hawkins on Sonora in 1946 with Milt Jackson, Fats Navarro, J. J. Johnson, and Max Roach. It’s based, according to tune detective Martin Williams, on Lover Come Back to Me. Jackie’s playing has his characteristic urgency and strikingly alive sense of time. Waldron, by contrast, is more thoughtful and contained and complements McLean’s burning impatience. Arthur Taylor is his usual non-diffident self, and Arthur Phipps bass is warm and dependable. Phipps, by the way, is also from the same neighborhood as Rollins, Taylor, and McLean.

What’s New opens with a short lyrical solo by Webster Young, a Washington trumpet player who has been encouraged by McLean. There’s also a brief comment by the mellow-toned trombonist, Curtis Fuller, currently a member of the Art Farmer–Benny Golson Jazztet. It’s interesting to contrast both the musical temperaments and timbres here of Young and Fuller in their larger solos, on the one hand, and McLean on the other, Jackie’s tone (which has become rounder in recent years) is nonetheless still piercingly impassioned and his approach to a solo has always been that of someone who has only this one solo left before Armageddon. Fuller and Young, by contrast, while emotionally committed to the music, aren’t as embroiled. There’s a robust solo by Paul Chambers and a clean-lined, functional statement by Coggins, Louis Hayes is bristlingly alert. I Never Knew is taken briskly and played incisively.

I Hear A Rhapsody begins and ends with an introspective McLean. In between, he wails loosely with Mal Waldon contributing a lucid solo. “Mal,” Mclean points out, “is a beautiful accompanist, as you can hear here. He leaves room for the soloist. I gave Mal his first record date, and have always been attracted by his melodic skill as a writer and player.”

The angular Jackie’s Ghost contains intelligent solos by all with perhaps the most arresting being Paul Chambers bowed flight. Chasin’ the Bird, a bop standard, is played with the kind of unselfconscious conviction that the jazzmen of Jackie’s generation possess almost by osmosis when working with the material with which they grew up. After also making this point, Michael James went on to say that the primary characteristic of Mclean’s own playing is “it’s utter frankness. There are no concessions to good taste in the form of evasions of the less attractive moods… McLean, probably unconsciously, certainly with pretense, has brought a heroic touch to the music of his place and his time… no other word better illustrates the stabbing sense of purpose that comes through even in the confines of a four-bar exchange. Nor does this have anything to do with the false charm of the conventional hero, that tightlipped cynosure of every eye. McLean’s is a quality that carries with it all the hurt and humiliation the sensitive spirit is prey to in a hostile society…”

I find James’ definition of a “hero” in this sense sentimental and naive, but he does project some of the harrowing quality in McLean’s playing. Jackie fortunately does not have a “hero” image of himself except as anyone does who is involved in self-expression and aware of mortality. Currently he is concerned, as most jazzmen are doomed to be, “with the fight to stay as modern as I can be, and even more so. Jazz has really taken a change in the past few years, especially because of Coltrane, and Coltrane comes through Monk. I go to Monk’s house quite often, and he’s helping me. He’ll play a chord, and then I’ll make a run through that chord. Monk will then show me the other possibilities I overlooked.”

Jackie, in short, is continuing to make changes, as all jazzmen have to do, one way or another, to keep getting themselves heard. My own feeling is that Jackie is just reaching a stage where the accumulated experience and personal anguish he’s known are fusing into a musical message that is going to be unmistakably significant – even to those who write feature articles on jazzmen.